The universe of patents and patent-related documents is becoming increasingly large and complex. The rate of patent application filings has generally increased over the last few years. Filing patent applications across borders has become easier and, as a result, more popular. Also, technology has become increasingly fragmented among different entities.
Because of such increasing complexity, providers of products and services have had increasing difficulty in interfacing with the patent universe to accomplish various tasks. For example, determining whether an innovator's product or service encroaches on another's intellectual property rights typically involves significant financial cost, time, and manpower. These types of inquiries require actual human analysis of hundreds or often thousands of patent references. Other tasks such as determining whether an invention is patentable, an issued patent is valid, a patent portfolio is infringed by others, or a product should be marked with a specific patent number also require increasingly greater resources. In many cases, the costs of carrying out these tasks in an effective manner are preclusive. For product and service providers with lesser means, carrying out such tasks is simply not possible.
Software-based tools have been developed to simplify intellectual property information searching, but with limited success. Some software programs enable users to text-search patent references, optionally limited to specific fields of the patent document (e.g. specification or claims). Some software programs rank retrieved patent references based on a weighting system using factors such as keyword frequency. Some software programs link one or more keywords with a set of synonyms, e.g. a lookup table, for yielding a greater number of references. These and other conventional systems may marginally increase the probability that a specific search pool includes all relevant references. However, such software tools are generally inadequate to reduce a pool of patent references to a practical amount in a manner in which a user could reasonably rely.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,984,047 teaches an improved system for organizing and retrieving intellectual property information by annotating patents based on elements required for infringement. Embodiments of the present invention provide further improvements including, among many other things, the ability to receive and store correlations of individual claims of patents with one or more elements to generate a hierarchical arrangement of elements.